Earlier this month, the front page of the Trinidad and Tobago Mirror - in which I once had a column titled "Without Malice" - was headlined "Join the Jihad". It had a huge picture of Hasan Anyabwile, described as a former head of security for the Islamic group Jamaat al-Muslimeen. He is also my son's stepfather. Amiri, my sixth child, is 16 and lives with his mother and Hasan in Port of Spain, where he is studying for the local equivalent of GCSEs.

Amiri was born in Trinidad and Tobago. He left there eight years ago and joined me and Mrs Howe in Brixton. He arrived here a Muslim, but that soon wore off in the playgrounds of south London schools.

He was recovering from a deep trauma. Hasan and his wife were active in a fundamentalist Muslim group. They wanted a quasi-religious state. They armed themselves, drew in police and members of the army, and recruited heavily among disaffected urban youth. Some, including Hasan, received military training in Libya. The main strategist was Amiri's uncle, Bilal Abdullah.

One Friday, after prayers, about 75 members of the mosque picked up arms and explosives, seized parliament, captured the radio stations and bombed the police headquarters. A fierce fight between the army (which took days to mobilise) and the insurgents terrorised the population. The entire shopping area of the city was burnt to the ground, and hundreds of weapons were handed out to the unemployed in the working-class suburbs. Armed police and soldiers tore into the area where the family lived, ripping up floorboards and firing rifles and pistols. Amiri, still a child, was in the middle of all this.

Eventually, peace talks took place, and Bilal drew up a memorandum that agreed an amnesty. The local courts threw out the amnesty, saying the government had made it under duress. Had it not been for the Privy Council in London, the insurgent leaders would have been hanged; as it was, they weren't even prosecuted. Hasan continued his way up the religious ladder. He is now a Maulana, a trained religious scholar.

Very recently he turned up in London, and spoke to me rather pleasantly. He always does, and he has always been reliable and decent as a stepfather. He was on his way to Sudan to further his religious studies. The Special Branch tracked him down somewhere in north London.

He cancelled his trip to Sudan and returned home when Afghanistan was bombed. In the Mirror, he invites able-bodied Muslim youths to join the jihad: "If they can find a way to Afghanistan, they should go." Then he adds ominously: "This is so serious that a woman can go without the permission of her husband, and a boy without his father's permission." Amiri is my son, and he is 4,000 miles away. I wait with trepidation.

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